GUATEMALA

READ

It’s been a long time since my last post, and frankly, there were times when I thought I’d never finish the book I had chosen for Guatemala, The President, by Miguel Angel Asturias. There were unrelated reasons for the delay – we had visits from out-of-town family and we sold our house and moved from one city to another – but it was the relentless misery facing the characters in this novel that made it difficult for me to pick it up and read it through to the end.

But it’s a new year, so I thought I’d try to get on track again. I just read the last page of The President, and am overwhelmed by the sheer horror of what life is like for people living in a country run by an unfeeling, narcissistic dictator. The setting for this novel is an unnamed Latin American country sometime early in the 20^th century. It is believed that the president in this novel is based on Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled Guatemala from 1898 until 1920, when he was finally forced out of office and imprisoned for corruption.

There is no such happy ending in this book, which opens with the random murder of one of the president’s most loyal military men. The president decides to use the murder to his advantage by pinning the crime on two people he believes are plotting against him. Many people are tortured into giving evidence to fit the president’s narrative, and the lives of the two men the president has accused suddenly become fraught with peril. One flees the city and goes into hiding; the other is arrested, faces a sham trial, and is executed. Camila, the beautiful daughter of the man who has gone into hiding, is abducted by the president’s closest adviser, a man known to the people as Angel Face. Throughout the book, it is said of Angel Face, “He was as beautiful and wicked as Satan.”

I found this description curious, because as the book progresses, Angel Face appears to be one of the very few characters who experiences any growth. He falls in love with the woman he has abducted, and she with him, but even before that, there are examples of Angel Face following his conscience. Perhaps his close relationship with the president makes him feel secure enough to do the occasional act of kindness for people in distress.

Unfortunately for Angel Face, in a country ruled by a brutal dictator, no one stays in favor for very long. I kept hoping for a good outcome, but in a regime where a person can be tortured or killed on a whim, and rumor and innuendo take the place of common sense and hard evidence, no one is safe. The book ends as tragically as it began.

COOK

In such a grim book, food descriptions take a back seat to the suffering of the characters. However, there were a couple of mentions of stew, so I found a recipe on ArtzyFoodie.com for Guatemalan stew that I was able to veganize.

This stew is generally made with chicken, simmered in a tomatillo sauce. Instead of chicken, I defrosted Gardein chick’n strips, sliced them into some approximation of shredded chicken, and added them to the stew for the last ten minutes of cooking. Served over white rice, this was a delicious and satisfying dish.

GIVE

GlobalGiving.com lists several projects in Guatemala, where the need is very great. It was difficult to choose just one, but I ended up donating to the type of project that always appeals to me, providing books for children in rural areas. According to the project description, “Guatemala has the second lowest literacy rate in Latin America and only one out of ten rural Guatemalans graduates from middle school.” Funds collected for this project will be used to “build lending libraries in indigenous, coffee-growing communities in Guatemala to provide children with access to books and literacy activities. We train local teachers to use library resources to weave reading and writing into the fabric of their classrooms.” By increasing the literacy rate, it is hoped that opportunities for economic mobility will also increase.

More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/help-build-school-libraries-in-rural-guatemala/.

NEXT STOP: GUINEA